gh-collab-manager

Source: RogerSquare/gh-collab-manager (local project) Category: Project tour

gh-collab-manager — a web dashboard for managing collaborators, invitations, and co-authors across all your GitHub repositories at once, driven by the gh CLI under the hood.

What it is

An Express server that shells out to the gh CLI for every GitHub operation (no REST token juggling on your end — gh auth login handles that), a plain HTML/CSS/JS frontend, and an audit log of every mutating action. Solves the “I have N repos and want to see who has access to all of them, without clicking through N settings pages” problem.

Stack

Layer	Technology
Backend	Express 5
GitHub auth	`gh` CLI (inherits your authenticated session)
Storage	`audit.json` rolling log (max 500 entries)
Frontend	Plain HTML / CSS / vanilla JS, GitHub-ish dark theme
Port	`3005` by default (env: `PORT`)

Features

Repo list — shows every repo you own or collaborate on
Collaborators view — per-repo list of who has what access
Add / remove collaborators — bulk across selected repos
Pending invitations — see and cancel invites
Contributor list — history of who has ever pushed
Co-author removal — strip a co-author from commit trailers
Repo metadata — description, topics, visibility, default branch
Repo reset — destructive; nuke and re-create from a known state
Audit log — every mutation is logged with action + details + timestamp

Shape

gh-collab-manager/
├── server.js                         # Express + gh CLI calls
├── audit.json                        # append-only log (rotated at 500)
├── public/
│   ├── index.html                    # main UI
│   └── claude-projects.html          # separate "Claude-touched projects" view
└── package.json

API surface (high level)

GET /api/user · GET /api/repos
GET /api/repos/:owner/:repo/collaborators · POST to add · DELETE /:username to remove
GET /api/repos/:owner/:repo/invitations · DELETE /:id to cancel
GET /api/repos/:owner/:repo/contributors
POST /api/repos/:owner/:repo/remove-coauthor
GET /api/repos/:owner/:repo/metadata
POST /api/repos/:owner/:repo/reset — destructive
GET /api/claude-projects — scan for claude-code-managed projects
GET /api/audit — read the audit log

Non-obvious design choices

gh CLI, not Octokit. The CLI already owns your session, pagination defaults, rate-limit handling. Using it keeps the server stateless from an auth standpoint — no tokens in env vars.
execFile, not exec. Arguments pass as array elements, not a shell string. Eliminates an entire category of injection bug when usernames or repo names contain unusual characters.
Audit log as append-only JSON. Up to 500 entries, then rolled. Cheap, readable, versionable.
No frontend framework. Single-user admin tool — HTML/CSS/JS is enough.

Gotchas

gh must be installed and authenticated on the server. If the backend runs somewhere you haven’t gh auth login’d, everything silently returns 401s.
Destructive actions lack confirmation by default. reset and bulk collaborator removal do exactly what they say — route them through a confirmation UI before production use.
Rate limiting inherits from gh. Burst requests can trip GitHub’s secondary rate limits; the tool doesn’t add its own backoff.
Audit log is not cryptographic. It’s a JSON file the same process writes to — trivial to tamper. Good enough for “did I do that?” recall, not for anything legal.